Scientists advise China to match current worldwide nuclear capacity.

"China is staring at the dark side of double-digit growth. Blackouts roll and factory lights flicker, the grid sucked dry by a decade of breakneck industrialization. Oil and natural gas are running low, and belching power plants are burning through coal faster than creaky old railroads can deliver it. Global warming? The most populous nation on earth ranks number two in the world - at least the Kyoto treaty isn't binding in developing countries. Air pollution? The World Bank says the People's Republic is home to 16 of the planet's 20 worst cities. Wind, solar, biomass - the country is grasping at every energy alternative within reach, even flooding a million people out of their ancestral homes with the world's biggest hydroelectric project. Meanwhile, the government's plan for holding onto power boils down to a car for every bicycle and air-conditioning for a billion-odd potential dissidents.
What's an energy-starved autocracy to do?

Go nuclear.

While the West frets about how to keep its sushi cool, hot tubs warm, and Hummers humming without poisoning the planet, the cold-eyed bureaucrats running the People's Republic of China have launched a nuclear binge right out of That '70s Show. Late last year, China announced plans to build 30 new reactors - enough to generate twice the capacity of the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam - by 2020. And even that won't be enough. The Future of Nuclear Power, a 2003 study by a blue-ribbon commission headed by former CIA director John Deutch, concludes that by 2050 the PRC could require the equivalent of 200 full-scale nuke plants. A team of Chinese scientists advising the Beijing leadership puts the figure even higher: 300 gigawatts of nuclear output, not much less than the 350 gigawatts produced worldwide today.

To meet that growing demand, China's leaders are pursuing two strategies. They're turning to established nuke plant makers like AECL, Framatome, Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse, which supplied key technology for China's nine existing atomic power facilities. But they're also pursuing a second, more audacious course. Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility..."

People who are familiar with my thinking will recognize that I am technically not a huge fan of the pebble bed reactors being promoted here, having a preference for other types of nuclear reactors that are less wasteful of nuclear resources. That said, the good news is that the Chinese, in a race against time have clearly made a nuclear committment that the opiated west is intellectually, ethically, and industrially incapable of making.

They at least have a shot at a future. We don't.


Wired: Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom

It's ok for a billion or so people to have nuclear power plants and nuclear capability to stave off using our oil up. But when other coutnries, namely Iran (and before this Saddam) build nuke power plants it has to be for a sinister reason? We are one fucked up country!

just no one is happy to have Iran have them.

This means that they are not even theoretically capable of being used for plutonium production. This means they basically have zero proliferation risk.

This is actually a huge drawback to this type of fuel. As the Russians have noted all along, plutonium is an enormous resource that must be recovered and used if humanity is to survive. Recovery of plutonium and valuable fission products from the silicon carbide pellets is technically difficult, to the extent it is possible at all. These pellets are basically designed to be stable for the rest of geological history. I don't like them for this reason.

"Presolar" silicon carbide, i.e., Silicon carbide that predates the formation of the earth, is known.

Here is one report of this material which was obtained by dissolving a meteorite in acid and analyzing the insoluble residue.

http://solarsystem.wustl.edu/01abstracts.htm

Since no one has ever been killed anywhere on earth in tens of thousands of reactor-years by the operation of a pressurized water reactor, I think these reactors are better options, although they are not as cheap to build as pebble bed reactors.

The debate over these nuclear technologies actually represents an instance of the environmentally dubious "disposable/reusable" debate that occurs for many products in wide use. I don't like disposable. I like reusable. Pebble bed reactors should be thought of in terms of being rather like McDonald's, where all the utensils and plates are Styrofoam and plastic. A PWR is like having washable dishes.

It is true that PWR's have a proliferation risk that is greater than zero, but the risk is still tiny when compared with the weapons/war risk of fossil fuels that is now playing out worldwide.

People don't ever discuss this, but the reason the WTC was attacked had everything to do with fossil fuels and nothing to do with nuclear energy. There have been zero nuclear terrorist attacks anywhere on earth. With the nutty and continuous attention that is paid to the minuscule probability of nuclear terrorism, though, attention paid by everyone from a delirious Dick Cheney to seriously deluded people on this website, you would think that such attacks are occurring every day.

Consider this: After creating some particularly nice holiday displays, some of my neighborhs now have lighted displays in their yards year-round. Another trend in making an impression through added consumption.

Now if nuclear power were to double from 20 to 40% in this country, to help offset this added demand, wouldn't that be a good thing for the climate? Or would the escalating energy dependency of our lifestyle make us even LESS likely to give up any established power source, such as coal? From my point of view, it looks like the latter. We already piss away potential CO2 savings from improved efficiency in certain machines.

Even given a mostly nuclear-powered world with sharply-curtailed greenhouse-gases, a significant rise in energy consumption could easily cause other imbalances that are just as threatening.

When the potential for consumption is limitless, then there is ever less tolerance for limiting the supply. We live in the narcissistic speed-freak version of a materialistic society, while the side of materialism that values our connectedness to the rest of nature is supressed. Perhaps the Chinese and others could go down a better path and realize that the magnitude of their society's energy budget affects every single environmental process and living thing.

Evironmentalists have been shamed and bullied away from their cultural role of leading society away from rampant consumerism. We begin to limit ourselves mainly to technocratic solutions that offer unconstrained power.

They mirror my own worries.

That said, I don't think it's quite as simple as lecturing on narcissism and materialism. I certainly think the Chinese would be well justified to view any such argument coming from an American with complete and total contempt.

If you look around the world to see which countries have the least respect for their environment, those where birth rates are completely out of control, you immediately see that these countries are impoverished. While China is suffering the consequences of past impoverishment, they have managed to create enough wealth to begin to think rather than merely react. It is expected that the population of Europe will soon begin to decline, which is a happy environmental trend. The same cannot be said for Africa. I note that China, where an understanding of science and engineering is still strongly culturally promoted, now that it's wealth is increasing, is also, for the first time in its history, managing it's population growth and unrestrained population growth is the root cause of the majority of the serious environmental risks we face.

The advantages and disadvantages of nuclear power growth in the United States are moot, so the nuclear terrified can stop crying their paranoid little hearts out... We are too stupid in this country to embrace nuclear power as is becoming increasingly clear to me. I hear arguments against nuclear energy from both the right and left in this country that are as so absurd as to border on the insane. The United States is in rapid, and, I think, rapidly accelerating decline. If you don't believe me, just look at who our "President" is. We are on the ash heap of history, more specifically the coal ash heap of history. We don't have the money to invest in nuclear energy. We are destroyed by debt and it is only a matter of time before our creditors, including the Chinese, kick in the doors on our house of cards. Indeed, it is only a matter of time before Mexico and Canada close their borders to keep the impoverished American immigrant workers out.

These realities aside, if one pauses to reflect a bit, it does not follow that the only reason to increase US nuclear capacity would have been connected with increased consumption. There are excellent reasons to increase capacity while lowering overall energy consumption. The main one is that nuclear energy is safe and clean in comparison to its alternatives. If the United States were France, with 80% or more of it's electrical energy generated by nuclear means, such an argument might be cogent. However the United States is not France. Most of the electrical energy here is generated from coal. One theory I have for the abject rise of stupidity in this country, which is nothing short of amazing, involves the neurological effects of coal contaminants, in particular, mercury.

...and certainly it goes beyond lecturing and justified negativity. It means setting a positive example in both our political and personal lives.

I have this theory of my own that there is an inverse relationship between family size and overall consumption. China and the US both seem eager to prove it, unfortunately.

Your reasons behind increasing nuclear energy while reducing consumption are fine. But we are culturally incapable of that, as things stand. There is no intention of ever "rightsizing" our energy budget to agree with 1) environmental capacity and 2) the efficiency of our own processes. The nuclear and coal industries are no different in that regard. What we are likely to end up with is a similar level of CO2 emission regardless of added nuclear energy capacity; they would start to promise us CO2 sequesterization like it was some sudden breakthrough idea, and that will always be "just around the corner". Meanwhile the economy becomes even nuttier and more hyperactive while creating new ecological disasters.

A big part of why environmentalists have the energy preferences they do (such as solar, wind and biomass) is because --instinctively or otherwise -- they are drawn to gentleness. Not just from superficial impressions, but through personal experience and lifecycle studies.

That's an interesting idea you have about mercury from coal. I think many French would agree with you :D Reminds me of how Cape Cod is downwind from two rather large coal-fired plants located near Fall River. As you know they recently rejected an opportunity to have a windfarm built offshore. There you have it.

Keep this in mind: Few communities are more NIMBY or more restrictive than where the captains of industry live. It is only those few exceptions that are derisively called "People's Republic Of Boulder, Cambridge, Austin, etc." even by progressives. Everyone really wants environmentalism in their lives, but there is a class struggle over who gets to practice it.

I contend that family size decreases as per capita consumption increases, whereas I think you are arguing that smaller families lead to greater consumption overall.

It is very clear that the impact of the increase of living standards in China has had a profound environmental effect on the atmosphere. This supports your case.

On the other hand, if one reads the scientific journal "Energy and Fuels" regularly, as I do, one sees that in general 30-60% of the articles written on biofuels and their chemistry are written by Chinese scientists. Another 20%-40% are written by Europeans. It is very rare to see an American chemist write such an article at all.

China has more than 30 nuclear plants under construction. The Americans are building zero nuclear plants. As I indicated in the opening of this thread Chinese scientists are recommending 200 such plants in which case they will be producing the most carbon free electricity on the planet. The US is officially denying that the greenhouse effect exists.

China is building a society where wealth is broadly distributed. We are building a society where class differences are huge and entrenched and wealth distributions are narrow. China is working hard to increase living standards broadly. We are destroying our middle class.

Therefore I think that a blanket statement that China and the US are somehow the same is misleading. I don't like the Chinese government. I think they are brutal and obviously undemocratic. However the fact is that they are doing a vastly better job for their country than the (allegedly) democratic United States.

I very much doubt that per capita greenhouse gas emissions in China will ever equal what they now equal in the United States. This is because the Chinese value education and they apply science and not religion to their daily lives. They are able to do so because they are wealthy, because increasingly, just like everyone on this site, they have access to computers, to energy. Unlike everyone on this site they can draw educated conclusions based more on reality than dogma.

Possibly the most enlightened comment from a 20th century politician, a comment by the way that ended up with him out of power and imprisoned for a time, had to be Deng Xiaoping's remark, "What does it matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it captures mice?"

So it is with building an environmentally sustainable life style. I don't think that it is particularly fair to describe "environmentalists" as "gentle," any more than it is useful to describe "Christians" as "loving." Speaking as an atheist, I can say that some devout Christians, my late mother, and then my step mother, for instance, were "loving." Others are aggressive, dogmatic fools who embrace criminal ideologies.

Nor do I think that there is something magically "gentle" about solar or biomass as forms of energy. (I concede that wind is almost always gentle and benign.) In fact biomass is already a widely used form of energy in the third world. Its use is completely out of control. The foothills of the Himalayas for instance have been completely deforested, as have huge swathes of Africa and the Amazon basin to provide "biomass." Nor could we say that first world adoption of such a strategy would necessarily be "gentle." One of the most serious environmental effects we now face has to do with the upsetting of the nitrogen cycle in service to agriculture, an upset that is by the way, energy intensive. Our agricultural practices are hardly sustainable, and if we destroy our land and water to drive cars, it is no different from destroying our air to drive cars.

The real toxicity of the (PV) solar industry has not emerged so dramatically because after decades and decades of recited liturgies about it's magical properties it is still too expensive for wide use. Because it is still less than 1% of world energy output, the real environmental consequences of its effects are obscure.

I want to be clear, too, that nuclear energy - the expanded use of which I very much support - while much safer than all alternatives except wind, should not be viewed as some magical panacea that will allow for business as usual as it was practiced in the late twentieth century. I think you are right on to point that out, and I thank you for doing so.

That said, I will repeat what I often repeat, the task of saving the environment ethically through reduction in population size still involves the incorporation of liberal goals: The elimination of poverty, health care for children, respect for the elderly, the elimination of racism, raising the status of women, access to family planning strategies, etc, etc.

I am increasingly cynical about whether an ethical approach to population control will occur. It is more likely under the circumstances that population reduction will happen through more and more brutal means: Environmental catastrophe, war, starvation, etc, etc.

People often compare George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler. My own historical comparison between Bush and a twentieth century historical figure is different. I think he's more like Nicholas II, a brutal dolt with bizarre religious fixations and an indolent corrupt family that used it's machinery to place him in a leadership role for which he was ill suited temperamentally or intellectually. When one looks at the etiology of most of the tragedy of the twentieth century, the First and Second World Wars, the development of nuclear weapons, the rise of Marxism and equally appalling rise of far right ideologies, one can usually trace these events back to some event set in motion at the dawn of the last century by this horrible twit, Nicholas II.

So it will be with his symbolic successor, George II.

It's sad to say, but I'm beginning to think that the 21st century will be even worse than the twentieth century. There is going to be hell to pay. I am glad to say that I will almost certainly be dead before it can get too bad, but I am very concerned for the lives of my two boys.

shouldn't an anti-consumerist lobby be formed for anti-consumerists, opening up environmentalism to those who wish to preserve the environment?

Your final paragraph in particular strikes me as the great failing of the environmental movement -- its members view it as something other than an environmental movement.

While I am not much of a consumer myself, I see the notion of replacing smelly, ugly, destructive energy production with cleaner and safer production as a simpler and more achievable goal than changing human nature. The Spartans were good at that -- pretty much everyone else has failed.

So yes, sign me up for the technocratic solution. I note with optimism (from an environmental standpoint) the fact that when artificially-produced energy becomes more affordable than human-produced energy in a society, birth rates decline and each individual's menu of options goes up. And in my view, clean energy slaves beat dirty energy slaves which beat all kinds of human slaves in producing the leisurely life that people seem to crave.

I think there are plenty of good reasons to campaign against consumerism, but I do wish the cause would properly segregate itself from those who wish for a better environment. The latter could then, perhaps, grow to encompass its full constituency rather than being artificially limited to a smaller subset.